Reprinted from The Washington Times , 5am -- May 15, 1998
Say what? Us worry? Let good times roll
By Wesley Pruden
Maybe acts do have consequences. Maybe competence, if not character, actually matters after all.
If the public-opinion polls are correct, we've decided as a nation that it's OK for our president to be more concerned with affairs of his pants than affairs of state, as long as it doesn't interfere with what he does (or doesn't do) for the rest of us between 9 and 5.
It's even OK to sell the Oval Office to a foreign government -- we're all addicted to Chinese takeout, anyway -- as long as the economy keeps humming and the Dow keeps ticking toward the 10,000 mark. I'm all right, Jack (and too bad if you're not).
The old joke in Little Rock that Bill Clinton thought a foreign affair was a weekend at the Peabody in Memphis with his best friend's wife turns out to be not such a joke. His idea of leadership abroad is trying to intimidate a close ally (Israel) into taking a suicide deal just to get the neighbors (the Arabs) to shut up, and encouraging the last communist superpower to scatter so much nuclear technology around Asia that the world's largest peacenik power (India) imagines it must build a nuclear arsenal of its own.
Not to worry, though: The president is off in Germany, campaigning for the fading Helmut Kohl, and the first lady is in Paris, supping in four-star restaurants and trying to show French schoolchildren how to get on the Internet, and both of them are having a high old time in nations not likely to force extradition.
Neither the attempted intimidation of Israel nor the obliviousness to India, with the predictable consequences, was a surprise to anyone who has been awake even occasionally. The would-be saboteurs of Israel in our State Department never sleep, and whether through incompetence or indifference, the president and his advisers always nod off when Israel's security concerns come to mind. There is no actual peace process in the Middle East, only a suicide process, and Israel avoids destruction only with constant and painful vigilance. Israel, as Sen. Arlen Specter rightly observed yesterday, has won all its wars with the 100 million Arabs who dream of throwing the Jews into the sea, but it can never afford to lose even one. No one, not even Moses, could patch a defeated Israel together again.
If this ever occurs to Bill Clinton, he gives no evidence of it. In fairness, he no doubt misses Miss Monica, and Kathleen's no longer at the White House, where everybody's got an eye on him, anyway. Buddy's a nice dog, but it's not the same. Life is not fair.
There's a rush to the judgment that the India bomb fiasco is all the CIA's fault, and while it may be true that the CIA has become little more than a first-rate clipping service and a second-rate think tank, a threat to the innocent only in the fevered imaginations of out-of-the-loop Hollywood screenwriters, it's not fair to blame India's bomb on the spooks at Langley.
The White House -- including the president, if he was around -- picked up hint after hint that something bad was coming, beginning with the election last winter of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, which campaigned on explicit promises to build nuclear weapons.
This should have been a wake-up call to Washington, but instead the president dispatched Bill Richardson, his ambassador to the United Nations, to New Delhi with assurances that Washington thought a lot of other things were more important than proliferation of nuclear weapons. This persuaded New Delhi that the United States had got over its "preoccupation" with blocking nuclear development in Asia.
Hadn't Bill Clinton told his new patrons in Beijing that it was OK for them to arm Pakistan with the latest technology, as this newspaper has been famously reporting in detail over these past months? Hadn't he winked at the nuclear ambitions of North Korea? Hadn't Beijing financed the Clinton re-election campaign, and hadn't he made sure, through Janet Reno, that there would be no examination of the sordid details? The deal, to any rational man, looked signed, sealed, paid for and delivered.
Who could blame the Indians, who have no more taste for oblivion than the Israelis, for deciding that the prudent part of valor would be to assure their own survival, by any means necessary?
The Indians, like the Israelis and other prudent nations around the world, concluded, even if many Americans have not, that the president of the United States imagines that he is still the governor of an American backwater, at liberty to buy and sell pieces of himself and his administration to whoever has ready cash at hand. If it was good enough for Arkansas it's good enough for the other 49 states. Let the good times roll.Wesley Pruden is editor in chief of The Times.
Copyright 1998 News World Communications, Inc.
Reprinted with permission of
The Washington Times.
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